


Triangle (all the ways you touch me)

by justholdstill



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Infidelity, M/M, Marauders' Era, maraudercest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-17 01:53:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11841513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justholdstill/pseuds/justholdstill
Summary: He will allow himself to be led up to their room and faithfully undressed, dismantled. He will allow the dark shape of Sirius' mouth to cross his skin, his lips and then his ear, muttering and seducing. And when Sirius surges inside of him he will say to himself that he does not know what James tastes like, will never know, not from this tongue.





	Triangle (all the ways you touch me)

**Author's Note:**

> originally published in (oh gosh) 2005, as a birthday gift for the very dear pansydarkbloom, who has long since disappeared from fandom.

**Triangle**

When Remus Lupin was eight years old he found a dead bird on the pavement beside his house, halted in flight by the unexpected barrier of a glass window. Looking at his reflection in the convexity of its glossy black eye, open and silent in death, he made his first acquaintance with the ambivalence and utter ordinaryness of mortality. For Remus it was the moment he began to be truly awake in his own life, aware that he was both alive and living, that there might be - and must be - an end.

He buried the bird in the back garden, spooning the dirt over its little hollow-boned body with a spade, taking into account the bright red of his mother's petunias against the drabness of its plumage, the damp soil.

 

He recalled the blackness of that eye again on a train platform, faced with the depth of it on the hair of a boy accompanied by his haughty-faced mother and father, a clinging, eager younger brother.

 

Remus held his breath at the sight, humid air straining at his lungs, waiting for the turn of the head, the glance, and then the slow, insouciant smile.

He was eight years old forever when Sirius looked at him after that, static in his sense of wonder, remotely and detachedly terrified at the revelation that was his life. He will never forget sitting down on the lid of his trunk, hearing the mournful whistle of the Hogwarts Express in his ears, along with the word _different_. The word _changed_.

 

*

 

But then there is James on his broom, sure and quick and dazzling. There is no competition for his lazy brilliance. His consuming brown gaze, his wildly sarcastic manner.

His hands across Sirius' back that are not Remus' hands.

It seems then that each kiss given to Remus by Sirius is merely one passed on from James, compensation in the way that James' kisses to Sirius are compensation for the fact that Sirius' hair is black and not red, that he is a gangly boy. That are not enough, but that will have to do.

*

 

When they come back from the lake with leaves in their hair, and Sirius' tie askew, autumn on their knees and on their faces, in their hapless boy-grins, Remus crumples a little bit but goes on drinking his cocoa. ( _No, I'm okay. Yes, I'm fine._ ) 

Beside him, Lily shifts, crossing one leg over the other, posing discreetly to get James' attention. Remus turns to her, catching the vaguely spicy scent of her hair as he does, and begins to say her name - "Lily" - but swallows the word and chokes on it seeing the glint of saliva in the kiss James offers and that she takes, Sirius' fingers on the side of his thigh a suggestion.

He will allow himself to be led up to their room and faithfully undressed, dismantled. He will allow the dark shape of Sirius' mouth to cross his skin, his lips and then his ear, muttering and seducing. And when Sirius surges inside of him he will say to himself that he does not know what James tastes like, will never know, not from this tongue. 

\- I'm going to come...Moony, I'm gonna...

How many lines he would cross, how many borders he would undraw just for the feel of this, he does not know. This basest of acts, this most ambiguous of theaters. This betrayal of self.

\- Do it. It's okay.

Before this he did not understand the restlessness of satiety, the moving of the room around him even as he lies still in it; it is evident in the tremors that follow him into his dreaming, in the moonlight that drapes Sirius' sleeping countenance in sadness like a veil.

 

*

 

\- I'm not fucking around. I know it's a war, but I don't suck you off because I think we're going to die. It's because...you, because...I'm not fucking around, Sirius.

Sirius.

Are you listening?

 

*

 

The slam of the front door. Fourteen thumping steps up the stairs. And then Sirius in the doorway of their bedroom, windswept. As close to tears as Remus has ever seen him.

\- Remus. Moony.

\- Sirius. How was James'?

\- Lily says - Lily says she's pregnant.

 

Just like that it is all undone. Sirius comes to him and puts his head on Remus' hip, what he says next muffled by denim and worn cotton.

\- Love you, Moony. 

\- Sirius...

\- No. Shut up. I love you.

Maybe. Something rises in him that feels suspiciously like hope, and he tries to quell it with the knowledge of the fact that he has always been second, he has always been the fallback. Been Not James. Sirius says it again with his lips against Remus' stomach, and again Remus thinks, a little more sure this time, _maybe_. 

 

*

 

He will have neither daughters nor sons. He will have something else instead, a hopeless, flailing, useless love to buoy him through a series of rundown flats in dodgy parts of the city, an amorphous, bewildering sense of victory that has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with being one of the ones left behind. 

 

Sirius turns over in his sleep, waking himself with his own movement. Blinks.

\- Moony, it's you.

As if he'd forgotten. 

 

And then he begins to laugh, the low rumble of his voice in his body like thunder breaking over hills Remus hasn't seen in years, but which he remembers, his ear against Sirius' chest, in the darkness on the edge of London.


End file.
